


The Other Ten Thousand Things

by Lomedet



Category: Dead Zone
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:48:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomedet/pseuds/Lomedet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ceremonies mark transitions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Ten Thousand Things

**Author's Note:**

> Note the first: written for the (first ever!) Dead Zone Photo Challenge. The poem from which I took the title can be found after the end of the story.  
> Note the second: Many, many thanks to Sage, who continues to be the bestest beta reader any girl could wish for. Also, a thousand thanks to Versaphile for running the challenge and being gracious to those of us who needed extra time.

_Funeral_

The funeral procession got lost. For years afterward, Walt hears the story told by people who were there and people who weren't, and he isn't much out of elementary school before he decides that it's one story he's never going to tell to anyone. Cleave's Mills is a small town, with only one cemetery, so an entire funeral procession getting lost is an Event that the town gossips don't let go of until Johnny Smith comes back to life. And in point of fact, Walt's main memory of the interesting part of the story is the hours sitting in the back seat of a car that still smelled like his mother, itching in his brand-new suit, with his father gripping his hand so tightly it almost hurt.

The story as it is told over the years goes something like this: there was construction on the two main roads leading from from the funeral home to the cemetery. The driver of the hearse had recently moved to Maine from Queens, where'd he'd worked for a funeral home owned by the cousin of the Cleave's Mills mortician, and his boss didn't realize that that meant he'd have no idea how to get around the road closures. Everyone agreed that it really wasn't the poor driver's fault, but no one was terribly sorry when, a month later, he got a job in a funeral home two towns over.

The driver, mistakenly trusting his New York City-honed sense of direction, decided that he could intuit his way around the roadwork, and proceeded to lead the entire funeral procession around in circles for three and a half hours looking for the cemetery until he finally gave in and stopped at the Baird's gas station to ask for directions. What no one can figure out, then or now, is why the man didn't pull over after the first half hour and ask the first car back in the procession (the one containing Walt and his dad) how to get to there. The most common speculation is that there's some crazy New York superstition about it being bad luck to stop a hearse before it gets to the cemetery, and that this superstition won out over everything except the driver's bladder.

The story everyone knows ends more or less well, with the minister's lovely graveside eulogy and a seemingly endless stream of cold cuts and covered dishes moving through the Bannerman's kitchen.

What Walt has never told anyone is that by the time they got to the cemetery, he had to pee so badly he couldn't think of anything else. A second cousin saw his distress and took him behind some bushes, and they rejoined the group without anyone except his father noticing. To this day, he's not sure how he feels about whizzing behind a tree at his own mother's funeral, but he takes some comfort from the fact that he *did* go before he left the house, just like she always told him to.

 

_Graduation_

Walt was definitely not looking forward to the Police Academy's graduation ceremony. It was going to be several hours worth of sitting and standing outside in the hot June sun, listening to boring speeches given by the sheriff, the mayor, and a state representative, sweating and itching inside his new dress uniform. He could only think of two things worth getting excited for on that day - the party after the ceremony, and the fact that it meant he would be finally done with training. He even joked with his classmates about skipping graduation altogether and just showing up at Jeremy's house with beers for everyone.

The beer was in the fridge on the morning of the ceremony, and he thought of it longingly as he looked at the uniform laid out on his bed. He put it on carefully, making sure that everything was buttoned, zipped, and otherwise fastened precisely in accordance with the sheet of directions that had come with the damn thing. He put the hat on, and turned to look at himself in the mirror.

A cop stared back at him. A cop who looked competent, and calm, and kind of scary, and a half a dozen other things Walt was pretty sure he wasn't.

During the ceremony, he found himself surrounded by dozens of competent, calm, and kind of scary cops who wore the faces of the men he'd gone through the Academy with. All through the boring speeches, he tried to figure out if everyone else was faking it as much as he was, and by the time the last name was called and the last hand shaken, he'd pretty much determined that yep, the uniform made every last one of them look ten times more confident than they actually were.

He'd only been on the force a few days when he figured out that this was true for every cop he knew.

_Wedding_

They had argued for weeks about whether the wedding should be before or after the birth: Walt arguing pretty strongly for before, and Sarah holding out for after. Eventually, Sarah won -her argument being that if she was going to see herself in wedding pictures for the rest of her life, she should get to decide how much she was going to weigh in those pictures. Walt knew better than to enter into any conversation about weight with a pregnant woman, and so gracefully gave way to his fiancee's wishes.

Johnny was six months old when they finally got around to tying the knot, and was a colicky, red-faced presence all through the ceremony. Walt tried not to think that this unprecedented exhibition on the part of the baby was the kid's attempt at raising an objection to the marriage -a kid couldn't miss a father he never knew, right? And besides, Walt had loved Johnny since the first moment he'd put a hand on Sarah's stomach and felt him kick. He'd been there to see him born. In the fatherhood sweepstakes, those things had to count for more than, or at be least equal to, the mere donation of half a kid's genetic code, didn't they?

During the reception, Walt somehow found himself on the dance floor with Johnny in his arms. Sarah came up behind him and encircled his waist with her arms. He relished the feeling of being between them, holding his son and being held by his wife. My wife, he thought. My son. To have and to hold, for richer and for poorer. From this day forward, we are a family.

_Home_

When J.J. started the ninth grade, his social studies class spent a month on kinship structures and the concept of 'family' in different cultures around the world. At dinner, in between mouthfuls, he told Walt and Sarah about matriarchal tribal groups, polygamous Mormons, and how the nuclear family of the 21st century U.S. was actually an aberration in terms of overall human history. Without missing a beat, he turned to Walt and said, "and you know, Dad, we're not really a nuclear family either, are we?"

Walt tried to not look like he'd just been punched in the gut, which was a good thing, because J.J. was still talking.

"I think we should move in with Johnny. I mean, all of you are connected through me, you're all my parents, and he totally has the space in his house. What do you think, Mom?"

Sarah, to Walt's immense satisfaction, looked as poleaxed as he felt, and kind of stammered her way around an answer. Somehow they got the discussion tabled for that night, and Walt kind of hoped that that would be it, but J.J. was persistent, and a week or so later, coming downstairs, Walt heard J.J. and Sarah in the kitchen, talking about it again. "Mom, I don't see why it's such a big deal -you keep saying that we're all a family, and families live together, right?"

Curious about Sarah's answer, Walt stopped on the stairs, holding himself as still as he would've if he'd been camping and come across a family of deer. He couldn't, however, stop himself from smiling when he heard Sarah take a deep breath and imagined the patented Patient Mom face she must be wearing.

"Yes, honey, we are a family, but even in families people need boundaries -places and things that are their own and that they don't necessarily share with each other. Remember a couple of years ago when you decided that you didn't want Dad or me to come into your room without knocking? That was you setting a boundary for us, one that we respected. And it's very important that your father and I respect Johnny's boundaries."

"Yeah, but Mom, if we all lived at Johnny's, you'd knock before you went into his room, right?"

Shoving the images that remark pulled up back into his subconscious where they belonged, Walt decided he didn't really need to hear the rest of the conversation, and walked loudly down the rest of the stairs. "Hey, J.J! Are we playing hockey today, or what?"

On the way home from their afternoon on the ice, J.J. asked the question Walt had kind of been hoping he'd be too tired for. "So, Dad, why don't we move in with Johnny?"

Walt sighed, looking over at this son who looked nothing like him and yet was still undeniably his son, not least in his tendency to keep asking a question until he'd gotten an answer he'd thought was satisfactory. It occurred to Walt, not for the first time, that J.J. might make a pretty good detective some day.

"Well, kiddo, for one thing, he hasn't asked us to, and it's kind of rude to just descend on someone else's house without being invited."

"But you do it all the time -when you have a case, or when you want to watch a hockey game without Mom around, or when you drop me off for one of my weekends and wind up staying for dinner, or..."

"Enough! I get it already." Walt smiled to take the sting from his words, and then thought more carefully about what J.J. had said. It was truer than he'd realized -somewhere in the past five years he'd gone from needing John to help him with his work to seeking out his company because he actually liked the guy for his own sake. When pressed, he could even admit that John was good for their family -he could talk with Sarah about things that Walt had absolutely no interest in (and where had his jealousy about *that* gone?), and J.J. had positively flourished under the love and attention of all three of the grown-ups in his life.

That night happened to be one of the 'family dinner' nights Sarah was so fond of, and in between bites of salad J.J. looked straight at John and said, "I think my parents and I should move in with you."

After J.J. cleaned up the wine John had spilled, apologizing profusely, if not entirely sincerely, for startling him, Johnny immediately started to say something about how of course J.J. and Walt and Sarah were always welcome in his house, but they had their own home and he wouldn't want to disrupt that or take time away from their family and all of a sudden Walt had had enough.

"All right, that's it. First things first -J.J., you need to work on your timing. Second, I'm sorry son, but I don't think your mom and I are ready to move out of our house, and whether or not we are, this is a big decision none of us are ready to make tonight, okay?"

J.J. nodded but looked rebellious, and out of the corner of his eye Walt saw Johnny getting ready to say something *else* about the primacy of the Walt-J.J.-Sarah family unit and cut him off before he could start.

"And, John, just so you're clear -you're as much a part of this family as I am, whether or not we live under the same roof."

"Walt, I..."

"I'm not finished yet. Sarah, will you go get the spare set of keys from the drawer, please?"

He couldn't read the expression on Sarah's face, but she got up and got the keys, and handed them to him before she sat down again.

He turned them over in his hand a few times, wondering where the pine tree keychain had come from and thinking about what he was about to do and how it felt, oddly, like a marriage or a graduation ceremony, only this time he had to make up his own words.

"John, I'd like you to have these, if you're willing to take them."

Walt couldn't read the expression on John's face as he reached out, tentatively, to take the keys. John closed his fingers around them and closed his eyes, and Walt started frantically trying to remember if there'd ever been anything particularly traumatic associated with the spare keys that lived in the kitchen junk drawer. John opened his eyes and smiled at him, saying, "You know, these haven't been used since you and J.J. went to the hardware store to have them cut."

"Well, feel free to use them whenever you'd like."

Feeling more than a little awkward about what had just happened, Walt sat back and looked around the table. John was looking at his salad like it was telling him the secrets of the universe (and if it was, Walt didn't want to hear about it) but with a quirk to his mouth like he was only a second away from grinning. Sarah was positively beaming at him, and he almost had to look away from the intensity of her smile and the tears in her eyes.

J.J. was looking at John, and Walt couldn't see his face. He wondered for a moment if he'd done this wrong, if he'd upset his son somehow, but then J.J. pushed back from the table and grabbed Walt in the fiercest hug he'd had from his son since J.J. discovered that hugging his parents was hopelessly uncool. He hugged back and heard J.J. whisper a quiet "thank you" into his shoulder. Walt pulled him even closer and whispered back, "You're welcome, son, but I didn't do it for you."

* * *

The title comes from this poem:

The Three Goals

The first goal is to see the thing itself  
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly  
for what it is.  
No symbolism please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing  
as unified, as one, with all the other  
ten thousand things.  
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,  
to see the universal and the particular,  
silmultaneously.  
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

-David Budbill


End file.
